First let me admit I haven't read through this whole thread -- it's just too long. So forgive me if this has been addressed.
But where did the researchers explain the flight of bees? From reading the article -- and not their original work -- I'm struck by their utter lack of understanding of the problem. The observables of bee flight -- how fast their wings beat, their angles of attack, the amount of lift generated, has been understood for at least a decade, and I would presume even longer. What is not understood is the/aerodynamics/ of bee flight, and the/physical ability of the bee and it's nervous system to perform the feat/.
I imagine most folks have seen highspeed video of bee flight before. So what exactly is new here? Fine, the wing moves in a 90 degree arc. It's surely interesting to watch, but what are the/mechanics at work?/
Yes; This is in our corporate information security policies, along with the suggestion that users use memorable song lyrics as the source pass phrase. Most users like that system, as it becomes fun to think up a new password.
14ckwbwtdbwb = Fourteen cannibal kings / wondering blindly what the dinner bell will bring
For a root system password, you may want an even longer password, both for cryptographic security where cryptographic systems support > 8 characters, and more importantly to discourage the use of the root system account by administrators when tools like sudo make its use unnecessary.
ItastD,DIgtiop,lttuatt,wyesok? = I turned and said to Dan, "Dan I guess this is our prime / like they tell us all the time / were you expecting some other kind?"
It's difficult to forget that password, but even in the event you do forget it, there's a strong possibility you'll remember enough to Google-up the answer. And I guarantee administrators will more frequently use (rules-driven, command-logged) sudo when the alternative is a 35-character root password.
The fact of the matter is that bicycling and walking use more fossil fuels than SUVs unless you're a vegetarian. This is almost indisputable. Walking is an extraordinarily inefficient means of locomotion compared to the car, and bicycling is only around 120% more efficient than walking.
If you are a 160lbs male, you will require ~465 kilocalories to walk five miles.
There are approximately 500 kilocalories in a 16oz of steak.
20,000 kilocalories of fossil fuels are required to produce 16oz of beef steak, mostly in the use of diesel fuel for the transportation and production of feed crops, but also in the use of petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides.
There are ~31,000 kilocalories in one gallon of gasoline. (This figure is somewhat variable depending on the quality of the gasoline).
Thus, a 160lbs male walking at 3.5mph gets around 7.5mpg -- or a bit worse than the Hummer.
In an economics sense, it doesn't really matter whether you claim to eat organic, or whether you claim to eat only grass-fed cattle instead of grain-fed cattle. Organic farming requires crop-rotation and fallow lands, and there are only so many grasslands to go around. The world cannot be fed by organic, grass-fed cattle. (Please note: I'm not saying the world cannot be fed by organic farming -- only that it can't be fed by organically raised, grass-land fed cattle).
This overstates things somewhat, because noone lives solely off of steak. But even given the typical American diet, cars are usually a more energy efficient mode of transportation than walking or bicycling. Walkers are only doing better than cars if they are vegetarians.
If you eat meat, you can't really criticize SUV drivers. That SUV driver may be vegan, and they be doing significantly more for the planet than yourself.
Middle-click on a link, and you'll get a new tab. Or, install the All-in-One gestures extension and you can right-click-drag-up to get a new tab. It could hardly be an easier.
If you switch to the small icons in the toolbar and remove the seldom-used history button, that'll just about make up for the added space used by the search bar.
Go ahead and mirror it. They post the whole shebang up for anyone to download, syndicate, ponder, or prod at. It's free for the world. Indeed, many sites, such as Webopedia, Answers.com, etc do mirror much of the content. The problem is that it changes so frequently it's difficult to do realtime or near-realtime synchronization.
This is stupid. Why on earth would I want some hunk of metal using "artificial intelligence" to determine which keywords I want to search for? That's my job. I have real intelligence, and I'm perfectly capable of determining which keywords to search for myself. What I'm not capable of is searching through a few billion webpages in under a second. That's its job.
Also, the name is stupid. They tried a little too hard on that one.
Also, the search engine sucks. If I search for "Fat Tire Beer", nowhere do I find New Belgium, the manufacturer. This result is first on Google.
Also, they're evidently afraid of competition. If I search for Accoona on Google, www.accoona.com is the top result. If I search for Google on Accoona, I get a lot of non-printing characters. But no link to Google.
Likely voter polls are already highly subjective. Each polling outfit has their own method of determining likely voters, usually based on historical trends. Democrats will tell you that their base is more likely to vote this year than in elections past, due to their extreme dislike of George W. Bush.
How would you weight the likely voter polls higher? What weight would you use? Any method in which you weight certain types of polls higher seems highly subjective to my mind. I'd prefer a main projection based on the latest polling, with separate projections which break out adults/registered/likely. 14, 30 and 90-day trend lines would also be sweet.
Also checkout this site which displays an electoral map/vote projection based on contract prices scraped from TradeSports.com/InTrade.
TradeSports.com is an online gaming site which sells contracts for all sorts of assertions: from sports betting, to political election outcomes. Some of the most actively traded contracts on TradeSports.com are related to the U.S. Presidential Election.
The site above scrapes the average bid price data from each of the state-by-state contracts for the assertion "George W. Bush to win the November 2004 Election."
A winning contract pays $USD 10, and a point costs $0.10. Thus, it can be assumed that a bid price > 50 indicates that the TradeSports.com market believes George W. Bush will win the election in that state, while a bid price below 50 indicates a win for John Kerry.
If you don't like the default rulesets (Bid prices between 45-55 unprojected; projection made with the bid price rather than the ask price; etc), the site allows you to configure your own parameters.
The state-by-state contracts trade rather thinly -- usually, only a few hundred dollars a day -- so take day-to-day movements with a grain of salt. The total size of the market is quite large, however -- totalling just under $1 million when all the states are combined.
The site currently projects a win for George W. Bush, with 284 electoral votes.
Mindless link propagation
on
Odds-on Science
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
TradeSports.com allows anyone to trade futures contracts on all manner of assertions, including assertions on the coming U.S. presidential election.
Checkout this site, which displays an electoral vote projection and map based on the state-by-state contracts for the 2004 U.S. presidential election. According to the TradeSports.com/InTrade market, the U.S. presidential election is tight, with Kerry projected to win 262 EVs to Bush's 242. 32 EVs are too close to call.
I didn't mean to claim the captcha-defeat-by-pr0n idea as my own. I think I made it pretty clear that the technique is already in use.
I was simply applying the same idea to ad clicks.
Reading through the comments of the story you linked to, though, I see a comment which notes that some pr0n sites are already doing this. They link to pay-by-click sites, then ask the visitor to write-in the fourth word from the third sentence on the site. (Or whatever else).
Where does that leave me in your numbered list? I'm not sure.
Sites like TicketMaster use captchas -- images of slightly distorted words which are hard for computers to interpret, but simple for humans -- to prevent spammers and bots from using (abusing) their services. I think some blog softwares have these simlple Turing tests built in as well.
Spammers and bot masters have come up with an incredibly simple solution, though. Pr0n.
Throw up a website with twenty or thirty thousand high-quality, free pr0n images. The catch? You have to type in the characters or words displayed in a captcha for every 'n' pr0n images.
Instant, distributed, human captcha OCR. If your pr0n site has heavy enough traffic, you can do this distributed captcha OCR fairly quickly -- sometimes in under a minute.
Why not do the same thing here. (Referer:? How to track the click @ the pr0n site? (JavaScript (a la WebTrends SDC?))).
I'm not sure of the details, but I suspect it would work.
"Year, right. And a large, high-tech/high-skill economy couldn't possibly suffer 10+ years of negative growth and deflation."
This has nothing whatsoever to do with free trade, nor offshoring. Japan's current woes are the result of a bubble economy bursting under the weight of many hundreds of billions in bad loans and the runaway deflation which followed.
I'm not sure how Japan's economy impeaches my proposition.
"Unfortunately, the cycle can take decades, if not centuries."
Right. It's slow. But it's slow in both directions. There is an ebb and a flow. But there's no tidal wave.
"And, do we really want to 'even out' with the rest of the world??? The fact is that the rest of the world (on average) lives in abject poverty, with no real freedom or quality of life."
Well, it's not our place to decide whether we want to or we don't want to. It's the decision of other Earth citizens to decide whether they want to continue financing our above-average lifestyles, or whether they'd like a little themselves.
When we run a trade deficit, we're taking foreign labor more often than they're taking ours.
It's a good bet that eventually they'll pick Number One.
Not sure what the effect would be, but it would assuredly be large. An interesting related fact is that Russia has a higher percentage of U.S. paper dollars than the U.S. itself does. (Paper dollars represent only a fraction of total U.S. capital).
Most countries' Federal Reserves also hold a huge portion of their reserves in dollars -- I seem to recall an estimate of this alone adding 0.5%-1% to U.S. annual GDP.
If the Bush Administration continues it's wink-wink-nudge-nudge "strong"-dollar policy ("strong" is to dollars as "healthy" is to forests), I believe we may soon find out where the tipping point is.
"wrong. they intend to buy chinese goods, because these are cheaper, fool. Americans do the same thing at Wall Mart every day."
I can tell you've put a lot of thought into this. So I don't mean to burst any bubbles, but there's just one problem with your theory: China does not accept U.S. dollars for their goods.
They may very well convert their dollars into Yuan and buy Chinese products. But as I covered elsewhere in this thread, at some point, those dollars are coming home, unless they're being used for decoration.
It can go through as many hands as you like. It may even take twenty years. But eventually they must return.
"a Hindu will accept a 5% wage increase in exchange for your 100% wage decrease."
Well, now you're just making numbers up. Fictious numbers do not make a persuasive argument.
"american wages will stagnate while corporate profits will go up. this means the social division of the GDP will become more unequal."
This has been the case over the past few years, probably for other factors. But protectionists have been making these arguments for decades, all while real wages made meteoric rises in all income quintiles.
Sorry, the facts just don't support your hypothesis.
"i'm sure there are some countries of the 3rd world which will tell you about the benefits of debt exceeding their GDP, because they had a fiscal crisis and their currency got grilled."
I'm not even going to touch this one...Not sure how this relates at all.
"so if the REAL value of the paper dollars they have received for their products is falling, didn't they, like, work for you for free?"
No -- It's only falling in relation to us. In relation to them, their currency is worth more against the American dollar. They can buy more American goods with the same amount of their own currency. Through this process, American goods because cheaper (and more attractive). Thus, our exports rise, and our employment increases to keep up.
"they wont. Chinese exports will increase."
Oh no. Not this again. Funny, you think there would have been a headline or two -- 'China Rules Trade -- Exports From All Other Countries Cease.'
You're a decade behind anyway, buddy. China was so the threat of the nineties.
Maybe. If it spreads the wealth without draconian redistributions, I think it's a good thing.
Just remember that every decade we have some new threat from some foreign nation to worry about. Some new nation we need to fear. The Soviet Union in the 60s/70's. (We will bury you). Japan in the 80s. China in the 90s. India now.
Ummm, no, actually, I didn't, which is why I went out of my way and said explicitly:
"But sooner or later the dollar will fall against foreign currencies -- as it is currently, btw -- and foreigners will begin to receive repayment of their loans to us, by way of American exports."...But I guess you didn't get that far.
Let's break it down to the simplest terms, and you tell me what you support:
A strong dollar policy -- imports are cheap and our exports are expensive. This hurts employment at home, but our real wages are higher.
A weak dollar policy -- imports cost more, and our exports are cheaper. This helps employment at home, but our real wages are lower.
A protectionists policy -- we close the border to trade, and make everything at home. This takes some of the edge of the upswings and downswings, but real wages are dramatically lower, and some products cannot be had at all.
There's an ebb and a flow -- and nothing is free. Yes, Virginia, we do have to pay something for our imports eventually.
You're missing the point. He doesn't have to buy American goods. He's only one link in the chain.
Our friendly worker in Bangalore may not have even been paid in dollars -- he might have gotten rupies. His American employers may have converted the American dollars to rupies at a bank.
Even if we assume the only people buying Coca Cola in India are rich executives making $100,000,000 bonues each year, the argument still holds.
A wealthy Indian (with rupies) gives his rupies to an American company (with dollars). They agree on the terms and make the trade.
The wealthy Indian man wants to purchase a Rolls Royce, from Britain. But now he has American dollars. So he trades with a British man (with pounds).
This British fellow wants to go on vacation to Hawai'i. He gets on a plane, books a room at the Hilton Hawaiian Village and sips Pina Colada by the ocean.
Thus the cycle is complete. Our worker in Bangalore is just scraping by. He has not bought any American goods, but just as surely an American product (Tourism to Hawaii) has been exported.
"You claim that every dollar we send to India is used to buy from the US. I call BS on that."
Sort of. I claim that every dollar we send to India is eventually either spent on American goods, or converted to another currency. Not necessarily immediately. The propogation is not instant. It could even take years. But eventually someone is going to come looking for their due, an American export.
Otherwise you're suggesting we're getting something for nothing. And if we're getting something for nothing, why wouldn't everyone else be getting something for nothing to? And where then is this something coming from? (Or if others could not do as we do, what are we doing that's so special which causes us to get something for nothing?)
I'm not debating the current state of the economy. It's not great. It's not great in Bangalore either. Things could probably be done to make the situation better. (Though smarter people than I at the policy-maker levels are certainly trying, without much luck)
If it's true that people with multiple doctorates are stuck working at fast food joints, I would guess they either chose a particularly esoteric field for study, or live in the wrong city or town for their work. I think that's the exception, not the norm.
That being said, if there really is no work to be done in their chosen field field, what would you do, if you were king, to rectify the situation?
Full employment is one of the easiest things in the world to create. All you have to do, as a government, is print money and put the people to work. But the trouble is if you don't put them to work efficiently -- an almost impossible task at such a large scale -- you create inflation, and everyone suffers as their real wages decline....Not a great situation for anyone.
I'm not advocating a pure Smithesque invisible hand, market-driven survival of the fittest economy. I'm just saying the problem is probably not offshoring.
I don't believe that's true. There were voluntary export limits, between 1.5 mil to 2mil units, from the 80s to mid 90s. But ever since 1994, I believe, there have been no tariffs on automobiles.
Easy: We cannot import from India more than the sum of what we export (to all countries). When we outsource American IT jobs to India, we are merely importing labor -- the same as we would import a car, or electronic device.
When an American company -- a company which sells the majority of its services or goods in America, for American dollars -- hires an Indian, the American company must either:
a) Pay the Indian employee in American dollars, or b) Convert the American dollars to rupies, and pay the Indian employee in rupies
Either way, the result is the same: At some point in the chain, someone is taking dollars for rupies, whether it's the employee or a third party. That party is not taking dollars because they like the smell of them. They're taking the dollars because they intend to buy American goods with the dollars. (Or they intend to convert the currency to another foreign currency -- and so the chain goes).
That we cannot import more than we export -- over the long term -- is true. To believe otherwise would mean we somehow live in a bubble where foreign countries work for us for free.
There is simply no way, over the long term, that we could outsource all of our jobs, to India or anywhere else anymore than they outsource their jobs to us. (More on that below). It's just not possible.
The special interests will come up with all sorts of nonsense, all manner of jargon to support their fear mongering. They'll talk of races to the bottom, living wages, social justice and other such things. But what they really mean is "gimme." (Read: I deserve to be making higher real wages for the same equivalent work because I am an American. When protectionists speak of races to the bottom, they ignore the flip side of the coin: a race to the top).
We can rack up debt in the way of trade deficits. Debt which will doubtlessly have to be paid off eventually. But sooner or later the dollar will fall against foreign currencies -- as it is currently, btw -- and foreigners will begin to receive repayment of their loans to us, by way of American exports.
As American exports increase, so too will employment, barring commensurate increases in productivity.
One other important point to make is the falsity of the assumption that only American companies are offshoring. This is the most ridiculous assumption of all, and I suspect it's the root cause of Americans' uneasyness towards offshoring.
Foreign companies offshore jops to America, too. In fact, more jobs are presently "offshored" -to- America from foreign companies than the opposite.
We all know how Flint, MI was hurt by General Motors' offshoring of factories to Mexico. Michael Moore even made a movie about it. But most people don't know about the tens of thousands who are employed in America by Toyota, by Mazda, or other Japanese car manufacturers. An American factory closing and moving to Mexico makes a great fear-mongering evening news story, but a similar-sized new factory operated by a foreign company in America does not.
Capitalism is inherently cyclical. It's the job of policy makers to make these cycles as painless as possible. But the cycles will always remain.
Slashdot Mirror
First let me admit I haven't read through this whole thread -- it's just too long. So forgive me if this has been addressed.
/aerodynamics/ of bee flight, and the /physical ability of the bee and it's nervous system to perform the feat/.
/mechanics at work?/
But where did the researchers explain the flight of bees? From reading the article -- and not their original work -- I'm struck by their utter lack of understanding of the problem. The observables of bee flight -- how fast their wings beat, their angles of attack, the amount of lift generated, has been understood for at least a decade, and I would presume even longer. What is not understood is the
I imagine most folks have seen highspeed video of bee flight before. So what exactly is new here? Fine, the wing moves in a 90 degree arc. It's surely interesting to watch, but what are the
Yes; This is in our corporate information security policies, along with the suggestion that users use memorable song lyrics as the source pass phrase. Most users like that system, as it becomes fun to think up a new password.
14ckwbwtdbwb = Fourteen cannibal kings / wondering blindly what the dinner bell will bring
For a root system password, you may want an even longer password, both for cryptographic security where cryptographic systems support > 8 characters, and more importantly to discourage the use of the root system account by administrators when tools like sudo make its use unnecessary.
ItastD,DIgtiop,lttuatt,wyesok? = I turned and said to Dan, "Dan I guess this is our prime / like they tell us all the time / were you expecting some other kind?"
It's difficult to forget that password, but even in the event you do forget it, there's a strong possibility you'll remember enough to Google-up the answer. And I guarantee administrators will more frequently use (rules-driven, command-logged) sudo when the alternative is a 35-character root password.
The fact of the matter is that bicycling and walking use more fossil fuels than SUVs unless you're a vegetarian. This is almost indisputable. Walking is an extraordinarily inefficient means of locomotion compared to the car, and bicycling is only around 120% more efficient than walking.
If you are a 160lbs male, you will require ~465 kilocalories to walk five miles.
There are approximately 500 kilocalories in a 16oz of steak.
20,000 kilocalories of fossil fuels are required to produce 16oz of beef steak, mostly in the use of diesel fuel for the transportation and production of feed crops, but also in the use of petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides.
There are ~31,000 kilocalories in one gallon of gasoline. (This figure is somewhat variable depending on the quality of the gasoline).
Thus, a 160lbs male walking at 3.5mph gets around 7.5mpg -- or a bit worse than the Hummer.
In an economics sense, it doesn't really matter whether you claim to eat organic, or whether you claim to eat only grass-fed cattle instead of grain-fed cattle. Organic farming requires crop-rotation and fallow lands, and there are only so many grasslands to go around. The world cannot be fed by organic, grass-fed cattle. (Please note: I'm not saying the world cannot be fed by organic farming -- only that it can't be fed by organically raised, grass-land fed cattle).
This overstates things somewhat, because noone lives solely off of steak. But even given the typical American diet, cars are usually a more energy efficient mode of transportation than walking or bicycling. Walkers are only doing better than cars if they are vegetarians.
If you eat meat, you can't really criticize SUV drivers. That SUV driver may be vegan, and they be doing significantly more for the planet than yourself.
However, X11 is bloated and slow over a remote network link. It's great if you're on a LAN, but pretty much unusable over the Internet.
Middle-click on a link, and you'll get a new tab. Or, install the All-in-One gestures extension and you can right-click-drag-up to get a new tab. It could hardly be an easier.
If you switch to the small icons in the toolbar and remove the seldom-used history button, that'll just about make up for the added space used by the search bar.
Go ahead and mirror it. They post the whole shebang up for anyone to download, syndicate, ponder, or prod at. It's free for the world. Indeed, many sites, such as Webopedia, Answers.com, etc do mirror much of the content. The problem is that it changes so frequently it's difficult to do realtime or near-realtime synchronization.
I googled for 'push screensaver' and found ModeElevent Broadcast Screensaver, which looks promising:
c ts &subsec=ModeEleven_Productss p
http://www.modeeleven.com/cgi-bin/doc?sec=Produ
And a review: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1401393,00.a
This is stupid. Why on earth would I want some hunk of metal using "artificial intelligence" to determine which keywords I want to search for? That's my job. I have real intelligence, and I'm perfectly capable of determining which keywords to search for myself. What I'm not capable of is searching through a few billion webpages in under a second. That's its job.
Also, the name is stupid. They tried a little too hard on that one.
Also, the search engine sucks. If I search for "Fat Tire Beer", nowhere do I find New Belgium, the manufacturer. This result is first on Google.
Also, they're evidently afraid of competition. If I search for Accoona on Google, www.accoona.com is the top result. If I search for Google on Accoona, I get a lot of non-printing characters. But no link to Google.
Likely voter polls are already highly subjective. Each polling outfit has their own method of determining likely voters, usually based on historical trends. Democrats will tell you that their base is more likely to vote this year than in elections past, due to their extreme dislike of George W. Bush.
How would you weight the likely voter polls higher? What weight would you use? Any method in which you weight certain types of polls higher seems highly subjective to my mind. I'd prefer a main projection based on the latest polling, with separate projections which break out adults/registered/likely. 14, 30 and 90-day trend lines would also be sweet.
Also checkout this site which displays an electoral map/vote projection based on contract prices scraped from TradeSports.com/InTrade.
TradeSports.com is an online gaming site which sells contracts for all sorts of assertions: from sports betting, to political election outcomes. Some of the most actively traded contracts on TradeSports.com are related to the U.S. Presidential Election.
The site above scrapes the average bid price data from each of the state-by-state contracts for the assertion "George W. Bush to win the November 2004 Election."
A winning contract pays $USD 10, and a point costs $0.10. Thus, it can be assumed that a bid price > 50 indicates that the TradeSports.com market believes George W. Bush will win the election in that state, while a bid price below 50 indicates a win for John Kerry.
If you don't like the default rulesets (Bid prices between 45-55 unprojected; projection made with the bid price rather than the ask price; etc), the site allows you to configure your own parameters.
The state-by-state contracts trade rather thinly -- usually, only a few hundred dollars a day -- so take day-to-day movements with a grain of salt. The total size of the market is quite large, however -- totalling just under $1 million when all the states are combined. The site currently projects a win for George W. Bush, with 284 electoral votes.
TradeSports.com allows anyone to trade futures contracts on all manner of assertions, including assertions on the coming U.S. presidential election.
Checkout this site, which displays an electoral vote projection and map based on the state-by-state contracts for the 2004 U.S. presidential election. According to the TradeSports.com/InTrade market, the U.S. presidential election is tight, with Kerry projected to win 262 EVs to Bush's 242. 32 EVs are too close to call.
:0 Wh: msgid.lock
| formail -D 16384 msgid.cache
maildrop:
`reformail -D 8192 duplicate.cache`
if ( $RETURNCODE == 0 )
exit
No more duplicated e-mails.
er, yeah, jmorton@gmail.com too. I've got three.
I didn't mean to claim the captcha-defeat-by-pr0n idea as my own. I think I made it pretty clear that the technique is already in use.
I was simply applying the same idea to ad clicks.
Reading through the comments of the story you linked to, though, I see a comment which notes that some pr0n sites are already doing this. They link to pay-by-click sites, then ask the visitor to write-in the fourth word from the third sentence on the site. (Or whatever else).
Where does that leave me in your numbered list? I'm not sure.
Sites like TicketMaster use captchas -- images of slightly distorted words which are hard for computers to interpret, but simple for humans -- to prevent spammers and bots from using (abusing) their services. I think some blog softwares have these simlple Turing tests built in as well.
Spammers and bot masters have come up with an incredibly simple solution, though. Pr0n.
Throw up a website with twenty or thirty thousand high-quality, free pr0n images. The catch? You have to type in the characters or words displayed in a captcha for every 'n' pr0n images.
Instant, distributed, human captcha OCR. If your pr0n site has heavy enough traffic, you can do this distributed captcha OCR fairly quickly -- sometimes in under a minute.
Why not do the same thing here. (Referer:? How to track the click @ the pr0n site? (JavaScript (a la WebTrends SDC?))).
I'm not sure of the details, but I suspect it would work.
"Year, right. And a large, high-tech/high-skill economy couldn't possibly suffer 10+ years of negative growth and deflation."
This has nothing whatsoever to do with free trade, nor offshoring. Japan's current woes are the result of a bubble economy bursting under the weight of many hundreds of billions in bad loans and the runaway deflation which followed.
I'm not sure how Japan's economy impeaches my proposition.
"Unfortunately, the cycle can take decades, if not centuries."
Right. It's slow. But it's slow in both directions. There is an ebb and a flow. But there's no tidal wave.
"And, do we really want to 'even out' with the rest of the world??? The fact is that the rest of the world (on average) lives in abject poverty, with no real freedom or quality of life."
Well, it's not our place to decide whether we want to or we don't want to. It's the decision of other Earth citizens to decide whether they want to continue financing our above-average lifestyles, or whether they'd like a little themselves.
When we run a trade deficit, we're taking foreign labor more often than they're taking ours.
It's a good bet that eventually they'll pick Number One.
Good point.
Not sure what the effect would be, but it would assuredly be large. An interesting related fact is that Russia has a higher percentage of U.S. paper dollars than the U.S. itself does. (Paper dollars represent only a fraction of total U.S. capital).
Most countries' Federal Reserves also hold a huge portion of their reserves in dollars -- I seem to recall an estimate of this alone adding 0.5%-1% to U.S. annual GDP.
If the Bush Administration continues it's wink-wink-nudge-nudge "strong"-dollar policy ("strong" is to dollars as "healthy" is to forests), I believe we may soon find out where the tipping point is.
Hehe, fun. Name calling.
"wrong. they intend to buy chinese goods, because these are cheaper, fool. Americans do the same thing at Wall Mart every day."
I can tell you've put a lot of thought into this. So I don't mean to burst any bubbles, but there's just one problem with your theory: China does not accept U.S. dollars for their goods.
They may very well convert their dollars into Yuan and buy Chinese products. But as I covered elsewhere in this thread, at some point, those dollars are coming home, unless they're being used for decoration.
It can go through as many hands as you like. It may even take twenty years. But eventually they must return.
"a Hindu will accept a 5% wage increase in exchange for your 100% wage decrease."
Well, now you're just making numbers up. Fictious numbers do not make a persuasive argument.
"american wages will stagnate while corporate profits will go up. this means the social division of the GDP will become more unequal."
This has been the case over the past few years, probably for other factors. But protectionists have been making these arguments for decades, all while real wages made meteoric rises in all income quintiles.
Sorry, the facts just don't support your hypothesis.
"i'm sure there are some countries of the 3rd world which will tell you about the benefits of debt exceeding their GDP, because they had a fiscal crisis and their currency got grilled."
I'm not even going to touch this one...Not sure how this relates at all.
"so if the REAL value of the paper dollars they have received for their products is falling, didn't they, like, work for you for free?"
No -- It's only falling in relation to us. In relation to them, their currency is worth more against the American dollar. They can buy more American goods with the same amount of their own currency. Through this process, American goods because cheaper (and more attractive). Thus, our exports rise, and our employment increases to keep up.
"they wont. Chinese exports will increase."
Oh no. Not this again. Funny, you think there would have been a headline or two -- 'China Rules Trade -- Exports From All Other Countries Cease.'
You're a decade behind anyway, buddy. China was so the threat of the nineties.
Maybe. If it spreads the wealth without draconian redistributions, I think it's a good thing.
Just remember that every decade we have some new threat from some foreign nation to worry about. Some new nation we need to fear. The Soviet Union in the 60s/70's. (We will bury you). Japan in the 80s. China in the 90s. India now.
Always something.
I know, I was going to touch on that. We could also send the Marines to Bangalore, rob them blind and send the money back home.
Net Result:
a) Higher personal income
b) Higher employment (as demand increases), and maybe even
c) Higher productivity (as income is invested)
The best of both worlds. But somehow this type of policy is frowned upon...
Ummm, no, actually, I didn't, which is why I went out of my way and said explicitly:
...But I guess you didn't get that far.
"But sooner or later the dollar will fall against foreign currencies -- as it is currently, btw -- and foreigners will begin to receive repayment of their loans to us, by way of American exports."
Let's break it down to the simplest terms, and you tell me what you support:
A strong dollar policy -- imports are cheap and our exports are expensive. This hurts employment at home, but our real wages are higher.
A weak dollar policy -- imports cost more, and our exports are cheaper. This helps employment at home, but our real wages are lower.
A protectionists policy -- we close the border to trade, and make everything at home. This takes some of the edge of the upswings and downswings, but real wages are dramatically lower, and some products cannot be had at all.
There's an ebb and a flow -- and nothing is free. Yes, Virginia, we do have to pay something for our imports eventually.
You're missing the point. He doesn't have to buy American goods. He's only one link in the chain.
Our friendly worker in Bangalore may not have even been paid in dollars -- he might have gotten rupies. His American employers may have converted the American dollars to rupies at a bank.
Even if we assume the only people buying Coca Cola in India are rich executives making $100,000,000 bonues each year, the argument still holds.
A wealthy Indian (with rupies) gives his rupies to an American company (with dollars). They agree on the terms and make the trade.
The wealthy Indian man wants to purchase a Rolls Royce, from Britain. But now he has American dollars. So he trades with a British man (with pounds).
This British fellow wants to go on vacation to Hawai'i. He gets on a plane, books a room at the Hilton Hawaiian Village and sips Pina Colada by the ocean.
Thus the cycle is complete. Our worker in Bangalore is just scraping by. He has not bought any American goods, but just as surely an American product (Tourism to Hawaii) has been exported.
"You claim that every dollar we send to India is used to buy from the US. I call BS on that."
...Not a great situation for anyone.
Sort of. I claim that every dollar we send to India is eventually either spent on American goods, or converted to another currency. Not necessarily immediately. The propogation is not instant. It could even take years. But eventually someone is going to come looking for their due, an American export.
Otherwise you're suggesting we're getting something for nothing. And if we're getting something for nothing, why wouldn't everyone else be getting something for nothing to? And where then is this something coming from? (Or if others could not do as we do, what are we doing that's so special which causes us to get something for nothing?)
I'm not debating the current state of the economy. It's not great. It's not great in Bangalore either. Things could probably be done to make the situation better. (Though smarter people than I at the policy-maker levels are certainly trying, without much luck)
If it's true that people with multiple doctorates are stuck working at fast food joints, I would guess they either chose a particularly esoteric field for study, or live in the wrong city or town for their work. I think that's the exception, not the norm.
That being said, if there really is no work to be done in their chosen field field, what would you do, if you were king, to rectify the situation?
Full employment is one of the easiest things in the world to create. All you have to do, as a government, is print money and put the people to work. But the trouble is if you don't put them to work efficiently -- an almost impossible task at such a large scale -- you create inflation, and everyone suffers as their real wages decline.
I'm not advocating a pure Smithesque invisible hand, market-driven survival of the fittest economy. I'm just saying the problem is probably not offshoring.
I don't believe that's true. There were voluntary export limits, between 1.5 mil to 2mil units, from the 80s to mid 90s. But ever since 1994, I believe, there have been no tariffs on automobiles.
Easy: We cannot import from India more than the sum of what we export (to all countries). When we outsource American IT jobs to India, we are merely importing labor -- the same as we would import a car, or electronic device.
When an American company -- a company which sells the majority of its services or goods in America, for American dollars -- hires an Indian, the American company must either:
a) Pay the Indian employee in American dollars, or
b) Convert the American dollars to rupies, and pay the Indian employee in rupies
Either way, the result is the same: At some point in the chain, someone is taking dollars for rupies, whether it's the employee or a third party. That party is not taking dollars because they like the smell of them. They're taking the dollars because they intend to buy American goods with the dollars. (Or they intend to convert the currency to another foreign currency -- and so the chain goes).
That we cannot import more than we export -- over the long term -- is true. To believe otherwise would mean we somehow live in a bubble where foreign countries work for us for free.
There is simply no way, over the long term, that we could outsource all of our jobs, to India or anywhere else anymore than they outsource their jobs to us. (More on that below). It's just not possible.
The special interests will come up with all sorts of nonsense, all manner of jargon to support their fear mongering. They'll talk of
races to the bottom, living wages, social justice and other such things. But what they really mean is "gimme." (Read: I deserve to be making higher real wages for the same equivalent work because I am an American. When protectionists speak of races to the bottom, they ignore the flip side of the coin: a race to the top).
We can rack up debt in the way of trade deficits. Debt which will doubtlessly have to be paid off eventually. But sooner or later the dollar will fall against foreign currencies -- as it is currently, btw -- and foreigners will begin to receive repayment of their loans to us, by way of American exports.
As American exports increase, so too will employment, barring commensurate increases in productivity.
One other important point to make is the falsity of the assumption that only American companies are offshoring. This is the most ridiculous assumption of all, and I suspect it's the root cause of Americans' uneasyness towards offshoring.
Foreign companies offshore jops to America, too. In fact, more jobs are presently "offshored" -to- America from foreign companies than the opposite.
We all know how Flint, MI was hurt by General Motors' offshoring of factories to Mexico. Michael Moore even made a movie about it. But most people don't know about the tens of thousands who are employed in America by Toyota, by Mazda, or other Japanese car manufacturers. An American factory closing and moving to Mexico makes a great fear-mongering evening news story, but a similar-sized new factory operated by a foreign company in America does not.
Capitalism is inherently cyclical. It's the job of policy makers to make these cycles as painless as possible. But the cycles will always remain.
There is no need to blow a fuse over it.